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Touch Myself.
By 1995, McManus was ready to move on.
He took a year off, his first real holiday ever. ‘I
just wanted to chill out and I could afford to do
that, but I certainly wasn’t a millionaire yet—
nowhere near it. The Divinyls thing was just part
of the training,’ he says.
During his long break, he considered his
options. ‘I had no degrees or schooling. The
only thing I had was my little black book, so I
rang some friends and asked them what to do
next.’ Someone suggested becoming a promoter.
Crooner Barry Manilow happened to be in need
of one, so McManus established the International
Touring Company. ITC became such a success it
was bought out by Abigroup, which then sacked
its founder in 2000. ‘I remember thinking, It’s my
126 HOW I MADE MY FIRST MILLION
company, how can they do that? And forty- eight
hours later I’d set up Andrew McManus Presents.’
The next year, McManus came up with the
idea for Kiss Symphony. That was his break-
through, he says: ‘the highlight of my career, and
when I made my first million’. Fortunately, he
was already mates with Kiss. ‘Gene [Simmons]
and Paul [Stanley] are great businessmen. They
jumped at the idea of putting the Melbourne
Symphony Orchestra in Kiss make- up and going
orchestral. We made the first million that night
and I was very proud to get 37,000 p eople along
to one of my shows,’ McManus says.
The promoter, who nominates a white Rolls-
Royce as the first extravagant thing he bought,
believes most modern rockers take the Pearl Jam
approach and run their bands as businesses. Some
never grow up. All they want is drink and drugs.
With bands like that, ‘you can’t give them too
many days off because they’ll go and get on the
soup, so you might lose them’.
McManus has also seen his share of weird riders
over the years (the list of demands an act sends out
in preparation for a tour). ‘Stevie Wonder just loves
to take the p***. He always asks for purple and
orange towels, for example. Stevie Nicks wanted
a certain running machine on a certain floor of
Crown Casino so she could look out the window
A FINE PERFORMANCE 127
while she was running and see the view.’ Of course,
he was more than willing to accommodate the
whims of her band
Fleetwood Mac, who
provided his com-
pany with its biggest
ever earn:
$
14 mill ion
from fourteen sold-
out shows. McManus’s other proud record is for
the biggest take from Sydney’s Acer Arena in one
night:
$
3 million, thanks to Luciano Pavarotti.
The financial crisis has knocked the business
around, slashing older audiences in particular.
‘They’ve been hit hard with their income and
their super funds, so they’re not spending,’ he
says. ‘Youth acts are still going strong because the
audience is young and living at home so they
still have spare cash.’
McManus has cut back on costs as much as
possible and is taking a far more conservative
approach to his business than he is used to. ‘I
should probably have battened down the hatches
more quickly, but I booked New Kids on the
Block and they failed dismally, even though my
research suggested they should do well. We took
a big hit there,’ he says.
‘Now I am being more careful, and more sen-
sitive about the price we charge for tickets. You
‘
‘
Stevie Wonder just loves
to take the p***. He always
asks for purple and orange
towels, for example.
128 HOW I MADE MY FIRST MILLION
can put p eople off even the biggest names by
charging too much.’
McManus says he is now expanding the
business, focusing heavily on ‘viral’ marketing
campaigns, which are cheap but enormously
effective when they work well.
The promoting game is not all hanging out
with famous p eople and scraping the cream off
their profits. ‘It’s a very risky business, and there
are too many promoters at the top level. If you
won’t pay enough for a particular band, someone
else will,’ he says. ‘It’s all about the money—no
loyalties in this business—and you can find your-
self paying too much and losing money. And yes,
tragically, that’s happened to me.
Bands like Kiss and Fleetwood Mac are dif-
ferent, he says: ‘They have a loyalty, and I know
what they’re going to need financially. I’m not
going to say I’m blessed, but I’ve had a very good
run, and made some very good friendships, and
it’s from them that the opportunities come.’
Besides cars—he has a Bentley and a brace of
Benzes to go with the Rolls—McManus’s other
extravagance is gambling. Just last weekend, he
won
$
154,000 on the Geelong/Melbourne Storm
double. He is, it seems, a man who just can’t lose—
unless he goes drinking with Tommy Lee.
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